Pizza Margherita

Pizza Margherita is a very good dinner solution for days when you have to head out the door again in 30 minutes or you just don't feel like cooking. It's so much better than frozen pizza and this fast'n'light version only takes a few minutes to prepare. While it bakes you can run around the house changing, packing or plainly act all couch potato.

This is what you need:

1 ready made pizza base with no topping. There are both fresh dough and ready baked bases in many shops.
1/2 jar of tomato purè or ready made pizza sauce
1 mozzarella cheese
fresh basil - dried basil or oregano will also do the trick
sea salt and freshly ground pepper

Bake according to the instructions on the base.

The most important thing for me is the chili olive oil you dribble over when it's done. This oil lifts a simple Margherita to unexpected heights.

The first time I had it was when I visited Milan with my Mum. We visited this little pizzeria just next to our hotel. The line went out of the restaurant and into the street! It looked hopeless but it didn't take long before we were inside, seated. Very effective, I have to say. The place was packed with normal Italian families, the tables were respatex and the chairs of the kind I had in school. The only ornaments on the wall were posters advertising beer. At this stage our curiosity of the place had us and we had to see what would happen.

A very stressed out waiter shouted something to us in Italian from the neighbouring table but quickly gathered from our blank stares that we were tourists. He then asked us in friendly yet bad English whether we wanted "Big" or "Small". Our blank stares continued followed by a somewhat confused shrug by me. The waiter with the heavy accent now tried a different angle. "One or two?" We quickly ordered "two", hoping that he was talking of pizza slices. The other thing the waiter wanted to know was if we'd like beer or Coke. And that was it. He disappeared and we sat there feeling a little lost in the Italian crowd digging into their pizzas. We however gathered our courage and started looking curiously around us. There was obviously only one type of pizza on the menu, and that was Margherita. The slices were huge and the crust was thick.

After only a few minutes our waiter returned with our drinks and a couple of minutes later he entered the room with four or five plates of pizza on each arm. Very effective! The pizza was baked on coals in a stone oven by the entrance, with an army of cooks making up the perfect assembly line for the largest pizzas I've ever seen. The coals made the base perfect. It was so tasty in itself that it being 5 cm high didn't matter. It was the perfect blend of lucious with a crust. By far the best pizza we've ever had.

As soon as we had finished our meal we we're politely given the bill and told to pay at the cashier by the entrance. This is the trick for getting a move on the line wich was still spilling out of the restaurant and into the street.

The next nigt we ended up in the same place after having talked of the special restaurant and the marvelous pizza the whole day. The staff recognised us immediately, telling us that his brother in law was working at our hotel. This time we ordered our two slices with confidence. What we hadn't noticed much the night before was the steel bowl being passed between the tables. It was full of olive oil with pieces of chili floating around. Neither of us dared risk ruining the great pizza so we passed it on. This didn't go unnoticed by the waiter. He came over with the bowl, spooned up olive oil and dribbled it on one of my slices with a smile, saying in thick accent "Try? Yes? Very good!" I did try and I have never regretted it. Chili olive oil on italian pizza is still a must!

Go a head and try it! If you can't get a hold of it, here are two ways of making it yourself.